This invention relates generally to network control and management and, more particularly, to billing network usage.
Presently, wide area networks (WAN's) have achieved an enormous popularity. The popularity of WAN's is, at least, partially due to their ability interconnect operations globally and to perform a variety of functions rapidly and economically. The functions performed by WAN's include data transport; for example, text, audio, and video data; message transport; conferencing; and searches of data bases. Each of these functions can require the transport of large amounts of data across the network. The transport of large amounts of data can use significant WAN bandwidth.
Users also employ WAN's for the distribution of data to groups of other users. One type of distribution is advertising where a large group of users will receive the distributed data. A second type of distribution is network conferencing, for example, video conferencing, which targets a well-defined and smaller group. A third type of distribution is electronic mail directed to a group of recipients, for example, the employees of a company. Distributions may require transmission of large amounts of data either because they target large groups or because they use data-intensive applications, such as, video or multimedia applications. The popularity of WAN's for the distribution of large data files has caused serious problems with maintaining sufficient WAN bandwidth particularly due to the proliferation of the Internet and ecommerce applications.
The convenience and usefulness of WAN's has produced an uncontrolled increase in bandwidth usage by individual users. This increase has substantially increased the cost of WAN's to businesses relying on them. The uncontrolled increase in bandwidth usage has given businesses two choices. Either accept anything and everything done by employee-users including the need to pay more and more for WAN services or restrict many WAN services from employ-users to control costs. Presently, businesses are unable to control bandwidth usage by employee-users without strongly limiting access to many convenient WAN features.
The increases in bandwidth usage have also resulted from undisciplined methods in the development of new applications that use WAN's.
The present invention is directed to overcoming, or, at least, reducing the effects of one or more of the problems set forth above.